On Being “Tempted to Knit”: Writing, Reviewing and Reading Biography

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Notes

I am grateful to participants at the Victorian Life Writing: Sources and Resources conference, Lancaster University, July 2005, for their helpful discussions about life writing, especially Keith Hanley, Valerie Fehlbaum, Philip Davis and Silvana Colella.

[1] Recent and specialised work that covers this ground includes Trev Lynn Broughton’s Men of Letters, Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Authority in the Late Victorian Period, Scott Casper’s Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth‐Century America, Julie F. Codell’s The Victorian Artist: Artists’ Lifewritings in Britain, C. 1870–1910 and Linda H. Peterson’s, Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing.

[2] See for example, “Auto‐biography,” “Modern Biography—Beattie’s Life of Campbell,” “Nelson’s Despatches and Letters,” “Spedding’s Life of Bacon,” and “Life of Sir Charles Napier.”

[3] Evidence can be found in “History, Biography, Voyages,” “Lewes’ Life and Works of Goethe,” Bentley’s Miscellany and “Lewes’s Life of Goethe,” Christian Review.

[4] During the 1880s, as Kelly Mays has shown, discussions about readers reached their greatest intensity. Mays cites Edward Dowden’s contribution: “For what, indeed, does it matter whether we read the best books or the worst, if we lack the power or instinct or the skill by which the reach the heart of any” (171). This emphasis on how to read, rather than simply what to read, likely fed into the same intensity traceable in periodical debates about biography during the latter half of the century.

[5] See also Elaine Freedgood’s article on Victorian lace for an argument that engages with the complicated modes of production, machine and hand, factory and domestic scenes of labour, which contribute to the problem of defining work and leisure.